A ban on autonomous weapons is easier said than done

Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and artificial intelligence researchers published a letter calling for a ban on autonomous weapons. This is an easy first step. A ban that works in practice will be much harder.

To coincide with a major Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference in Buenos Aires this week, leading scientists, world-renowned philosophers and technology investors signed a letter that urges a ban on weapons that use artificial intelligence technology. We have added our names to the sixteen thousand (and rising) signatures. We are not in favour of automated weapons that make the decision to kill someone. As reported in the Guardian yesterday, the researchers that drafted this letter think that autonomous cars already include the technical capacities required to do this.

But signing up to the letter is the easy part. The history of global technology regulation warns us that making this kind of statement is much easier than realising what it asks for. It can be difficult to to work out exactly what to ban and to make a ban stick. It is even harder to design a smart moratorium on technology - one that reflects the motivations behind the open letter published this week.